Aly Nielsen is a staff writer and research analyst for MRC Business.

Latest from Aly Nielsen

Giving $1 million to the conservative-bashing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) wasn’t enough for Apple. It is matching donations by its employees and using iTunes to encourage users to donate even more to the SPLC, which regularly depicts mainstream conservative organizations as “hate groups.”

According to MRC Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor, Steve Bannon’s White House exit will not “alienate the conservative media.” “Donald Trump is a smart guy. He can never go left enough to satisfy the media and the left,” Gainor told Intelligence Report host Trish Regan, “So he’s not going to alienate the conservative media. He will make nice in some way.”

A recent New York Times story could be summed up in a single common-sense statement: People who dislike regulation support deregulation. But instead, The Times devoted 3,300 words to portraying deregulation as a special deal between a single company and the FCC. Because that company is Sinclair, which is a media company with “conservative” leanings.

Climate alarmist Al Gore’s second film, An Inconvenient Sequel, failed to heat up the box-office, falling from 16th to 18th over the Aug. 11-13 weekend. It’s a dramatic fall from glory for the climate alarmist whose first film, An Inconvenient Truth, won several awards including an Oscar and grossed $24 million.

Liberal journalists hate to be proven wrong. So they’re going to despise the latest video from Sinclair’s Mark Hyman that bashes Politico and other lefty outlets for sloppy reporting. “Donald Trump's campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage,” claimed Politico. Turns out that wasn’t even close to the whole story. Sinclair offered to show Politico emails proving it offered the identical deal to the Clinton campaign, but Politico showed no interest.

If you Google public relations disaster, you’ll find Google. Over the weekend a now-fired Google employee wrote an internal memo asserting the company’s liberal bias made it inhospitable to conservative ideas. Political donations made by board members of Alphabet -- Google’s parent company -- shows that bias goes straight to the top.

LGBTQ activist Tim Gill wants to “punish the wicked” who oppose gay marriage. And part of his agenda includes giving $5.25 million to 25 media groups between 2003 and 2015. Gill told Rolling Stone “we’re going to punish the wicked” on the “religious right” as part of a shift to focus on nondiscrimination. According to Rolling Stone, Gill is “the nation’s most powerful force for LGBTQ rights.”

Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos hit two milestones after the most recent stock market rally. He nudged out Bill Gates as the world’s richest man -- briefly -- and became the first person to have a net worth of more than $90 billion.

The White House declared the week of July 16, “Made in America” week to celebrate U.S. manufacturing -- a continuance of President Donald Trump’s “America First” campaign focus. But ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows minimized the administration’s focus, mentioning it only one night of the week and used it to criticize Trump.

The liberal media would have you believe Russian involvement in the U.S. is new and tied solely to the Trump administration. But records from 2010 and 2011 reveal Russia may have funded U.S.-based environmental groups, 10 of which are also backed by liberal billionaire George Soros.

Climate alarmists regularly claim combating climate change is a moral issue. But some take their hyperbolic rhetoric to new heights.Vox energy and climate change writer David Roberts claimed “This generation of humanity is engaged in a moral crime, the scale & consequences of which dwarf anything in our species’ history.”

As fact-checkers play an increasingly important role in journalism, it’s important to fact check who funds them. One such journalistic operation -- the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) -- just received a massive financial boost from two liberal groups: George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) and The Omidyar Network.

The broadcast networks have refused to cover the conclusion of a massive defamation case involving one of their own. ABC News and Beef Products Inc (BPI) reached a confidential settlement which concluded a 5-year-old lawsuit as of June 27. BPI filed a $1.9 billion lawsuit against ABC News in 2012 for reports that the company’s lean finely textured beef (LFTB) as dangerous “pink slime.” ABC may have been liable for up to $5.7 billion if it lost the case because of South Dakota’s Agricultural Food products Disparagement Act.

Climate activist Tom Steyer thinks “grassroots” and Astroturf are the same thing. The billionaire told Politico he would spend $7.5 million in eight states this year to teach young voters about “traditional American ways of grass-roots organizing.”

Climate alarmist and former vice-president Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Sequel is getting updated to slam President Donald Trump’s withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. An Inconvenient Sequel, as its name suggests, is a follow-up to Gore’s inaccurate 2006 climate change film An Inconvenient Truth. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was the climax of Sequel.

Four years after Beef Products Inc. (BPI) filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News for smearing its lean finely textured beef (LFTB) as “pink slime,” the two have reached a settlement.

The $1.9 billion case against ABC News finally went before the jury June 5, 2017 and was settled June 28. While the terms were confidential, BPI spokesperson Tom Becker told The Media Research Center it was “a great point for the company. They’ve been vindicated.”

The broadcast networks routinely cover so-called “hate” crimes, but when conservative nonprofits were smeared as hate groups, they said nothing. The Associated Press (AP) reported on June 8, nonprofit-tracking organization Guidestar had added “hate group” tags to 46 nonprofit groups’ profiles including The Family Research Council (FRC) and The American Family Association.

Georgians in the sixth Congressional district just elected their first female to the House of Representatives in the most expensive House race in history. While all three broadcast networks reported the race was historic in terms of spending, only NBC clearly acknowledged that most of the donations came from outside the state of Georgia.

The coal industry is often ignored by the liberal media and simultaneously attacked by left-wing environmentalists. That’s precisely what happened over a recent mine, but the New York Post told a far different story from both of them.

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